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THE DISCOVERY
OF THE FUTURE

THE DISCOVERY
OF THE FUTURE

BY

H. G. Wells

NEW YORK
B. W. HUEBSCH

1913

Copyright, 1913,
By B. W. HUEBSCH

Printed m U. S. A.

THE DISCOVERY OF THE
FUTURE*

By H. G. Wells

IT will lead into my subject most con-
veniently to contrast and separate two
divergent types of mind, types which
are to be distinguished chiefly by their at-
titude toward time, and more particularly
by the relative importance they attach and
the relative amount of thought they give
to the future.

The first of these two types of mind, and
it is, I think, the predominant type, the
type of the majority of living people, is
that which seems scarcely to think of the
future at all, which regards it as a sort
of blank non-existence upon which the ad-

*A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution.

5

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

vancing present will presently write events.
The second type, which is, I think, a more
modern and much less abundant type of
mind, thinks constantly and by preference
of things to come, and of present things
mainly in relation to the results that must
arise from them. The former type of
mind, when one gets it in its purity, is retro-
spective in habit, and it interprets the
things of the present, and gives value to
this and denies it to that, entirely with re-
lation to the past. The latter type of mind
is constructive in habit, it interprets the
things of the present and gives value to
this or that, entirely in relation to things
designed or foreseen.

While from that former point of view
our life is simply to reap the consequences
of the past, from this our life is to prepare
the future. The former type one might
speak of as the legal or submissive type of
mind, because the business, the practice,
and the training of a lawyer dispose him

6

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

toward it; he of all men must constantly
refer to the law made, the right established,
the precedent set, and consistently ignore
or condemn the thing that is only seeking
to establish itself. The latter type of mind
I might for contrast call the legislative,
creative, organizing, or masterful type, be-
cause it is perpetually attacking and alter-
ing the established order of things, perpetu-
ally falling away from respect for what the
past has given us. It sees the world as one
great workshop, and the present is no more
than material for the future, for the thing
that is yet destined to be. It is in the active
mood of thought, while the former is in the
passive; it is the mind of youth, it is the
mind more manifest among the western na-
tions, while the former is the mind of age,
the mind of the oriental.

Things have been, says the legal mind,
and so we are here. The creative mind says
we are here because things have yet to be.

Now I do not wish to suggest that the
7

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

great mass of people belong to either of
these two types. Indeed, I speak of them
as two distinct and distinguishable types
mainly for convenience and in order to
accentuate their distinction. There are
probably very few people who brood con-
stantly upon the past without any thought
of the future at all, and there are probably
scarcely any who live and think consistently
in relation to the future. The great mass
of people occupy an intermediate position
between these extremes, they pass daily and
hourly from the passive mood to the active,
they see this thing in relation to its associa-
tions and that thing in relation to its conse-
quences, and they do not even suspect that
they are using two distinct methods in their
minds.

But for all that they are distinct meth-
ods, the method of reference to the past
and the method of reference to the future,
and their mingling in many of our minds
no more abolishes their difference than the

8

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

existence of piebald horses proves that
white is black.

I believe that it is not sufficiently recog-
nized just how different in their conse-
quences these two methods are, and just
where their difference and where the fail-
ure to appreciate their difference takes one.
This present time is a period of quite ex-
traordinary uncertainty and indecision
upon endless questions — moral questions,
SBSthetic questions, religious and political
questions — upon which we should all of us
be happier to feel assured and settled; and
a very large amount of this floating uncer-
tainty about these important matters is due
to the fact that with most of us these two
insufficiently distinguished ways of looking
at things are not only present together, but
in actual conflict in our minds, in unsus-
pected conflict; we pass from one to the
other heedlessly without any clear recog-
nition of the fundamental difference in
conclusions that exists between the two, and

9

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

we do this with disastrous results to our
confidence and to our consistency in deal-
ing with all sorts of things.

But before pointing out how divergent
these two types or habits of mind really
are, it is necessary to meet a possible ob-
jection to what has been said. I may put
that objection in this form : Is not this dis-
tinction between a type of mind that thinks
of the past and a type of mind that thinks
of the future a sort of hair-splitting, al-
most like distinguishing between people
who have left hands and people who have
right? Everybody believes that the pres-
ent is entirely determined by the past, you
say; but then everybody believes also that
the present determines the future. Are we
simply separating and contrasting two sides
of everybody's opinion? To which one re-
plies that we are not discussing what we
know and believe about the relations of
past, present, and future, or of the relation
of cause and effect to each other in time.

lO

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

We all know the present depends for its
causes on the past, and the future depends
for its causes upon the present. But this
discussion concerns the way in which we
approach things upon this common ground
of knowledge and belief. We may all know
there is an east and a west, but if some of us
always approach and look at things from
the west, if some of us always approach and
look at things from the east, and if others
again wander about with a pretty disregard
of direction, looking at things as chance de-
termines, some of us will get to a westward
conclusion of this journey, and some of us
will get to an eastward conclusion, and
some of us will get to no definite conclusion
at all about all sorts of important matters.
And yet those who are travelling east, and
those who are travelling west, and those
who are wandering haphazard, may be all
upon the same ground of belief and state-
ment and amid the same assembly of proven
facts. Precisely the same thing, divergence
II

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

of result, will happen if you always ap-
proach things from the point of view of
their causes, or if you approach them al-
ways with a view to their probable effects.
And in several very important groups of
human affairs it is possible to show quite
clearly just how widely apart the two
methods, pursued each in its purity, take
those who follow them.

I suppose that three hundred years ago
all people who thought at all about moral
questions, about questions of Right and
Wrong, deduced their rules of conduct ab-
solutely and unreservedly from the past,
from some dogmatic injunction, some
finally settled decree. The great mass of
people do so to-day. It is written, they
say. "Thou shalt not steal," for example —
that is the sole, complete, sufficient reason
why you should not steal, and even to-day
there is a strong aversion to admit that
there is any relation between the actual
consequences of acts and the imperatives of

13

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

right and wrong. Our lives are to reap the
fruits of determinate things, and it is still a
fundamental presumption of the estab-
lished morality that one must do right
though the heavens fall. But there are peo-
ple coming into this world who would re-
fuse to call it Right if it brought the heav-
ens about our heads, however authoritative
its sources and sanctions, and this new dis-
position is, I believe, a growing one. I sup-
pose in all ages people in a timid, hesitating,
guilty way have tempered the austerity of a
dogmatic moral code by small infractions
to secure obviously kindly ends, but it was,
I am told, the Jesuits who first deliberately
sought to qualify the moral interpretation
of acts by a consideration of their results.
To-day there are few people who have
not more or less clearly discovered the fu-
ture as a more or less important factor in
moral considerations. To-day there is a
certain small proportion of people who
frankly regard morality as a means to an
13

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

end, as an overriding of immediate and
personal considerations out of regard to
something to be attained in the future, and
who break away altogether from the idea
of a code dogmatically established forever.
Most of us are not so definite as that, but
most of us are deeply tinged with the spirit
of compromise between the past and the
future; we profess an unbounded alle-
giance to the prescriptions of the past, and
we practise a general observance of its in-
junctions, but we qualify to a vague, vari-
able extent with considerations of expedi-
ency. We hold, for example, that we must
respect our promises. But suppose we find
unexpectedly that for one of us to keep a
promise, which has been sealed and sworn
in the most sacred fashion, must lead to
the great suffering of some other human
being, must lead, in fact, to practical evil?
Would a man do right or wrong if he
broke such a promise? The practical de-
cision most modern people would make

14

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

would be to break the promise. Most
would say that they did evil to avoid a
greater evil. But suppose it was not such
very great suffering we were going to in-
flict, but only some suffering? And sup-
pose it was a rather important promise?
With most of us it would then come to be
a matter of weighing the promise, the
thing of the past, against this unexpected
bad consequence, the thing of the future.
And the smaller the overplus of evil conse-
quences the more most of us would vacil-
late. But neither of the two types of mind
we are contrasting would vacillate at all.
The legal type of mind would obey the
past unhesitatingly, the creative would un-
hesitatingly sacrifice it to the future. The
legal mind would say, "they who break the
law at any point break it altogether," while
the creative mind would say, "let the dead
past bury its dead."

It is convenient to take my illustration
from the sphere of promises, but it is in the
15

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

realm of sexual morality that the two
methods are most acutely in conflict.

And I would like to suggest that until
you have definitely determined either to
obey the real or imaginary imperatives of
the past, or to set yourself toward the de-
mands of some ideal of the future, until
you have made up your mind to adhere to
one or other of these two types of mental
action in these matters, you are not even
within hope of a sustained consistency in
the thought that underlies your acts, that
in every issue of principle that comes upon
you, you will be entirely at the mercy of
the intellectual mood that happens to be
ascendent at that particular moment in
your mind.

In the sphere of public affairs also these
two ways of looking at things work out
into equally divergent and incompatible
consequences. The legal mind insists upon
treaties, constitutions, legitimacies, and
charters; the legislative incessantly assails

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THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

these. Whenever some period of stress sets
in, some great conflict between institutions
and the forces in things, there comes a sort-
ing out of these two types of mind. The
legal mind becomes glorified and trans-
figured in the form of hopeless loyalty, the
creative mind inspires revolutions and re-
constructions. And particularly is this
difference of attitude accentuated in the
disputes that arise out of wars. In most
modern wars there is no doubt quite trace-
able on one side or the other a distinct
creative idea, a distinct regard for some
future consequence; but the main dispute
even in most modern wars and the sole
dispute in most mediaeval wars will be
found to be a reference, not to the future,
but to the past; to turn upon a question of
fact and right. The wars of Plantagenet
and Lancastrian England with France, for
example, were based entirely upon a
dummy claim, supported by obscure legal
arguments, upon the crown of France.
17

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

And the arguments that centered about the
late war in South Africa ignored any ideal
of a great united South African state al-
most entirely, and quibbled this way and
that about who began the fighting and what
was or was not written in some obscure re-
vision of a treaty a score of years ago. Yet
beneath the legal issues the broad creative
idea has been apparent in the public mind
during this war. It will be found more or
less definitely formulated beneath almost
all the great wars of the past century, and a
comparison of the wars of the nineteenth
century with the wars of the middle ages
will show, I think, that in this field also
there has been a discovery of the future, an
increasing disposition to shift the reference
and values from things accomplished to
things to come.

Yet though foresight creeps into our
politics and a reference to consequence into
our morality, it is still the past that domi-
nates our lives. But why? Why are we so

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THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

bound to it? It is into the future we go,
to-morrow is the eventful thing for us.
There lies all that remains to be felt by us
and our children and all those that are
dear to us. Yet we marshal and order men
into classes entirely with regard to the
past; we draw shame and honor out of the
past; against the rights of property, the
vested interests, the agreements and estab-
lishments of the past the future has no
rights. Literature is for the most part his-
tory or history at one remove, and what is
culture but a mold of interpretation into
which new things are thrust, a collection of
standards, a sort of bed of King Og, to
which all new expressions must be lopped
or stretched? Our conveniences, like our
thoughts, are all retrospective. We travel
on roads so narrow that they suffocate our
traffic; we live in uncomfortable, incon-
venient, life-wasting houses out of a love of
familiar shapes and familiar customs and
a dread of strangeness; all our public af-
19

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

fairs are cramped by local boundaries im-
possibly restricted and small. Our cloth-
ing, our habits of speech, our spelling, our
weights and measures, our coinage, our re-
ligious and political theories, all witness to
the binding power of the past upon our
minds. Yet we do not serve the past as the
Chinese have done. There are degrees.
We do not worship our ancestors or pre-
scribe a rigid local costume; we dare to
enlarge our stock of knowledge, and we
qualify the classics with occasional adven-
tures into original thought. Compared
with the Chinese we are distinctly aware of
the future. But compared with what we
might be, the past is all our world.

The reason why the retrospective habit,
the legal habit, is so dominant, and always
has been so predominant, is of course a
perfectly obvious one. We follow a fun-
damental human principle and take what
we can get. All people believe the past is
certain, defined, and knowable, and only a

20

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

few people believe that it is possible to
know anything about the future. Man
has acquired the habit of going to the
past because it was the line of least re-
sistance for his mind. While a certain va-
riable portion of the past is serviceable
matter for knowledge in the case of every-
one, the future is, to a mind without an
imagination trained in scientific habits of
thought, non-existent. All our minds are
made of memories. In our memories each
of us has something that without any spe-
cial training whatever will go back into the
past and grip firmly and convincingly all
sorts of workable facts, sometimes more
convincingly than firmly. But the imagi-
nation, unless it is strengthened by a very
sound training in the laws of causation,
wanders like a lost child in the blankness
of things to come and returns empty.

Many people believe, therefore, that
there can be no sort of certainty about the
future. You can know no more about the

21

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

future, I was recently assured by a friend,
than you can know which way a kitten will
jump next. And to all who hold that view,
who regard the future as a perpetual
source of convulsive surprises, as an im-
penetrable, incurable, perpetual blankness,
it is right and reasonable to derive such
values as it is necessary to attach to things
from the events that have certainly hap-
pened with regard to them. It is our ig-
norance of the future and our persuasion
that that ignorance is absolutely incurable
that alone gives the past its enormous pre-
dominance in our thoughts. But through
the ages, the long unbroken succession of
fortune-tellers — and they flourish still —
witnesses to the perpetually smoldering
feeling that after all there may be a better
sort of knowledge — a more serviceable sort
of knowledge than that we now possess.

On the whole there is something sympa-
thetic for the dupe of the fortune-teller in
the spirit of modern science; it is one of

22

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

the persuasions that come into one's mind,
as one assimilates the broad conception of
science, that the adequacy of causation is
universal; that in absolute fact — if not in
that little bubble of relative fact which
constitutes the individual life — in absolute
fact the future is just as fixed and deter-
minate, just as settled and inevitable, just
as possible a matter of knowledge as the
past. Our personal memory gives us an
impression of the superior reality and trust-
worthiness of things in the past, as of
things that have finally committed them-
selves and said their say, but the more
clearly we master the leading conceptions
of science the better we understand that
this impression is one of the results of the
peculiar conditions of our lives, and not
an absolute truth. The man of science
comes to believe at last that the events of
the year A.D. 4000 are as fixed, settled,
and unchangeable as the events of the year
1600. Only about the latter he has some
23

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

material for belief and about the former
practically none.

And the question arises how far this ab-
solute ignorance of the future is a fixed and
necessary condition of human life, and how
far some application of intellectual methods
may not attenuate even if it does not abso-
lutely set aside the veil between ourselves
and things to come. And I am venturing
to suggest to you that along certain lines and
with certain qualifications and limitations a
working knowledge of things in the future
is a possible and practicable thing. And in
order to support this suggestion I would
call your attention to certain facts about our
knowledge of the past, and more particu-
larly I would insist upon this, that about the
past our range of absolute certainty is very
limited indeed. About the past I would
suggest we are inclined to overestimate our
certainty, just as I think we are inclined to
underestimate the certainties of the future.
And such a knowledge of the past as we
24

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

have is not all of the same sort or derived
from the same sources.

Let us consider just what an educated
man of to-day knows of the past. First of
all he has the realest of all knowledge — the
knowledge of his own personal experi-
ences, his memory. Uneducated people
believe their memories absolutely, and most
educated people believe them with a few
reservations. Some of us take up a critical
attitude even toward our own memories;
we know that they not only sometimes drop
things out, but that sometimes a sort of
dreaming or a strong suggestion will put
things in. But for all that, memory re-
mains vivid and real as no other knowledge
can be, and to have seen and heard and felt
is to be nearest to absolute conviction. Yet
our memory of direct impressions is only
the smallest part of what we know. Out-
side that bright area comes knowledge of
a different order — the knowledge brought
to us by other people. Outside our imme-
25

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

diate personal memory there comes this
wider area of facts or quasi facts told us by
more or less trustworthy people, told us by
word of mouth or by the written word of
living and of dead writers. This is the
past of report, rumor, tradition, and his-
tory — the second sort of knowledge of the
past. The nearer knowledge of this sort is
abundant and clear and detailed, remoter
it becomes vaguer, still more remotely in
time and space it dies down to brief, im-
perfect inscriptions and enigmatical tradi-
tions, and at last dies away, so far as the
records and traditions of humanity go, into
a doubt and darkness as blank, just as
blank, as futurity.

And now let me remind you that this
second zone of knowledge outside the
bright area of what we have felt and wit-
nessed and handled for ourselves — this
zone of hearsay and history and tradition
— completed the whole knowledge of the
past that was accessible to Shakespeare, for
26

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

example. To these limits man's knowledge
of the past was absolutely confined, save for
some inklings and guesses, save for some
small, almost negligible beginnings, until
the nineteenth century began. Besides the
correct knowledge in this scheme of hear-
say and history a man had a certain
amount of legend and error that rounded
off the picture in a very satisfactory and
misleading way, according to Bishop
Ussher, just exactly 4004 years B.C. And
that was man's universal history — that was
his all — until the scientific epoch began.
And beyond those limits — ? Well, I sup-
pose the educated man of the sixteenth cen-
tury was as certain of the non-existence of
anything before the creation of the world
as he was, and as most of us are still, of
the practical non-existence of the future,
or at any rate he was as satisfied of the im-
possibility of knowledge in the one direc-
tion as in the other.

But modern science, that is to say the
27

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

relentless systematic criticism of phenom-
ena, has in the past hundred years absolute-
ly destroyed the conception of a finitely
distant beginning of things; has abolished
such limits to the past as a dated creation
set, and added an enormous vista to that
limited sixteenth century outlook. And
what I would insist upon is that this fur-
ther knowledge is a new kind of knowl-
edge, obtained in a new kind of way. We
know to-day, quite as confidently and in
many respects more intimately than we
know Sargon or Zenobia or Caractacus,
the form and the habits of creatures that no
living being has ever met, that no human
eye has ever regarded, and the character of
scenery that no man has ever seen or can
ever possibly see; we picture to ourselves
the labyrinthodon raising its clumsy head
above the water of the carboniferous
swamps in which he lived, and we figure
the pterodactyls, those great bird lizards,
flapping their way athwart the forests of
28

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

the Mesozoic age with exactly the same
certainty as that with which we picture the
rhinoceros or the vulture. I doubt no
more about the facts in this farther picture
than I do about those in the nearest. I be-
lieve in the megatherium which I have
never seen as confidently as I believe in the
hippopotamus that has engulfed buns from
my hand. A vast amount of detail in that
farther picture is now fixed and finite for all
time. And a countless number of investi-
gators are persistently and confidently en-
larging, amplifying, correcting, and push-
ing farther and farther back the boundaries
of this greater past — this prehuman past —
that the scientific criticism of existing phe-
nomena has discovered and restored and
brought for the first time into the world
of human thought. We have become pos-
sessed of a new and once unsuspected his-
tory of the world — of which all the history
that was known, for example, to Dr. John-
son is only the brief concluding chapter;
29

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

and even that concluding chapter has been
greatly enlarged and corrected by the ex-
ploring archaeologists working strictly up-
on the lines of the new method — that is to
say, the comparison and criticism of sug-
gestive facts.

I want particularly to insist upon this,
that all this outer past — this non-historical
past — is the product of a new and keener
habit of inquiry, and no sort of revelation.
It is simply due to a new and more critical
way of looking at things. Our knowledge
of the geological past, clear and definite as
it has become, is of a different and lower
order than the knowledge of our memory,
and yet of a quite practicable and trust-
worthy order — a knowledge good enough
to go upon ; and if one were to speak of the
private memory as the personal past, of the
next wider area of knowledge as the tra-
ditional or historical past, then one might
call all that great and inspiring back-

30

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

ground of remoter geological time the in-
ductive past.

And this great discovery of the inductive
past was got by the discussion and redis-
cussion and effective criticism of a number
of existing facts, odd-shaped lumps of
stone, streaks and bandings in quarries and
cliffs, anatomical and developmental detail
that had always been about in the world,
that had been lying at the feet of mankind
so long as mankind had existed, but that no
one had ever dreamed before could supply
any information at all, much more reveal
such astounding and enlightening vistas.
Looked at in a new way they became
sources of dazzling and penetrating light.
The remoter past lit up and became a pic-
ture. Considered as effects, compared and
criticised, they yielded a clairvoyant vision
of the history of interminable years.

And now, if it has been possible for men
by picking out a number of suggestive and
significant looking things in the present, by
31

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

comparing them, criticising them, and dis-
cussing them, with a perpetual insistence
upon "Why?" without any guiding tradi-
tion, and indeed in the teeth of established
beliefs, to construct this amazing search-
light of inference into the remoter past, is
it really, after all, such an extravagant and
hopeless thing to suggest that, by seeking
for operating causes instead of for fossils,
and by criticising them as persistently and
thoroughly as the geological record has
been criticised, it may be possible to throw
a searchlight of inference forward instead
of backward, and to attain to a knowledge
of coming things as clear, as universally
convincing, and infinitely more important
to mankind than the clear vision of the
past that geology has opened to us during
the nineteenth century?

Let us grant that anything to correspond
with the memory, anything having the
same relation to the future that memory
has to the past, is out of the question. We

32

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

cannot imagine, of course, that we can ever
know any personal future to correspond
with our personal past, or any traditional
future to correspond with our traditional
past; but the possibility of an inductive fu-
ture to correspond with that great induc-
tive past of geology and archaeology is an
altogether different thing.

I must confess that I believe quite firmly
that an inductive knowledge of a great
number of things in the future is becoming
a human possibility. I believe that the time
is drawing near when it will be possible
to suggest a systematic exploration of the
future. And you must not judge the prac-
ticability of this enterprise by the failures
of the past. So far nothing has been at-
tempted, so far no first-class mind has ever
focused itself upon these issues; but suppose
the laws of social and political develop-
ment, for example, were given as many
brains, were given as much attention, criti-
cism, and discussion as we have given to the
33

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

laws of chemical combination during the
last fifty years, what might we not expect?

To the popular mind of to-day there is
something very difficult in such a sugges-
tion, soberly made. But here, in this insti-
tution (the Royal Institution of London)
which has watched for a whole century over
the splendid adolescence of science, and
where the spirit of science is surely under-
stood, you will know that as a matter of
fact prophecy has always been inseparably
associated with the idea of scientific re-
search.

The popular idea of scientific investiga-
tion is a vehement, aimless collection of
little facts, collected as a bower bird col-
lects shells and pebbles, in methodical little
rows, and out of this process, in some man-
ner unknown to the popular mind, certain
conjuring tricks — the celebrated "wonders
of science" — in a sort of accidental way
emerge. The popular conception of all
discovery is accident But you will know

34

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

that the essential thing in the scientific pro-
cess is not the collection of facts, but the
analysis of facts. Facts are the raw mate-
rial and not the substance of science. It
is analysis that has given us all ordered
knowledge, and you know that the aim and
the test and the justification of the scientific
process is not a marketable conjuring trick,
but prophecy. Until a scientific theory
yields confident forecasts you know it is un-
sound and tentative; it is mere theorizing,
as evanescent as art talk or the phantoms
politicians talk about. The splendid body
of gravitational astronomy, for example, es-
tablishes itself upon the certain forecast of
stellar movements, and you would absolute-
ly refuse to believe its amazing assertions if
it were not for these same unerring fore-
casts. The whole body of medical science
aims, and claims the ability, to diagnose.
Meteorology constantly and persistently
aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in
a place of honor until it can certainly fore-
35

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

tell. The chemist forecasts elements before
he meets them — it is very properly his boast
= — and the splendid manner in which the
mind of Clerk Maxwell reached in front of
all experiments and foretold those things
that Marconi has materialized is familiar
to us all.

All applied mathematics resolves into
computation to foretell things which other-
wise can only be determined by trial. Even
in so unscientific a science as economics
there have been forecasts. And if I am
right in saying that science aims at proph-
ecy, and if the specialist in each science is in
fact doing his best now to prophesy within
the limits of his field, what is there to stand
in the way of our building up this growing
body of forecast into an ordered picture of
the future that will be just as certain, just
as strictly science, and perhaps just as de-
tailed as the picture that has been built up
within the last hundred years of the geolog-
ical past? Well, so far and until we bring

36

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

the prophecy down to the affairs of man
and his children, it is just as possible
to carry induction forward as back; it is
just as simple and sure to work out the
changing orbit of the earth in the future
until the tidal drag hauls one unchanging
face at last toward the sun as it is to work
back to its blazing and molten past. Un-
til man comes in, the inductive future
is as real and convincing as the inductive
past. But inorganic forces are the smaller
part and the minor interest in this concern.
Directly man becomes a factor the nature
of the problem changes, and our whole
present interest centers on the question
whether man is, indeed, individually and
collectively incalculable, a new element
which entirely alters the nature of our in-
quiry and stamps it at once as vain and
hopeless, or whether his presence compli-
cates, but does not alter, the essential na-
ture of the induction. How far may we
37

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

hope to get trustworthy inductions about
the future of man?

Well, I think, on the whole, we are in-
clined to underrate our chance of certain-
ties in the future, just as I think we are in-
clined to be too credulous about the histor-
ical past. The vividness of our personal
memories, which are the very essence of
reality to us, throws a glamor of conviction
over tradition and past inductions. But
the personal future must in the very nature
of things be hidden from us so long as time
endures, and this black ignorance at our
very feet — this black shadow that corre-
sponds to the brightness of our memories
behind us — throws a glamor of uncertainty
and unreality over all the future. We are
continually surprising ourselves by our
own will or want of will; the individual-
ities about us are continually producing
the unexpected, and it is very natural to
reason that as we can never be precisely
sure before the time comes what we are go-

38

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

ing to do and feel, and if we can never
count with absolute certainty upon the acts
and happenings even of our most, intimate
friends, how much the more impossible is
it to anticipate the behavior in any direc-
tion of states and communities.

In reply to which I would advance the
suggestion that an increase in the number
of human beings considered may positively
simplify the case instead of complicating
it; that as the individuals increase in num-
ber they begin to average out. Let me il-
lustrate this point by a comparison. An-
gular pit-sand has grains of the most varied
shapes. Examined microscopically, you
will find all sorts of angles and outlines
and variations. Before you look you can
say of no particular grain what its out-
line will be. And if you shoot a load of
such sand from a cart you cannot foretell
with any certainty where any particular
grain will be in the heap that you make;
but you can tell — you can tell pretty defi-
39

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

nitely — the form of the heap as a whole.
And further, if you pass that sand through
a series of shoots and finally drop it some
distance to the ground, you will be able to
foretell that grains of a certain sort of
form and size will for the most part be
found in one part of the heap and grains
of another sort of form and size will be
found in another part of the heap. In
such a case, you see, the thing as a whole
may be simpler than its component parts,
and this I submit is also the case in many
human affairs. So that because the individ-
ual future eludes us completely that is no
reason why we should not aspire to, and dis-
cover and use, safe and serviceable, gener-
alizations upon countless important issues
in the human destiny.

But there is a very grave and important-
looking difference between a load of sand
and a multitude of human beings, and this
I must face and examine. Our thoughts
and wills and emotions are contagious. An
40

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

exceptional sort of sand grain, a sand grain
that was exceptionally big and heavy, for
example, exerts no influence worth con-
sidering upon any other of the sand grains
in the load. They will fall and roll and
heap themselves just the same whether that
exceptional grain is with them or not; but
an exceptional man comes into the world, a
Caesar or a Napoleon or a Peter the Her-
mit, and he appears to persuade and con-
vince and compel and take entire posses-
sion of the sand heap — I mean the com-
munity — and to twist and alter its desti-
nies to an almost unlimited extent. And
if this is indeed the case, it reduces our
project of an inductive knowledge of the
future to very small limits. To hope to
foretell the birth and coming of men of ex-
ceptional force and genius is to hope in-
credibly, and if, indeed, such exceptional
men do as much as they seem to do in
warping the path of humanity, our utmost
prophetic limit in human affairs is a con-
41

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

ditional sort of prophecy. If people do so
and so, we can say, then such and such re-
sults will follow, and we must admit that
that is our limit.

But everybody does not believe in the
importance of the leading man. There are
those who will say that the whole world is
different by reason of Napoleon. There
are those who will say that the world of
to-day would be very much as it is now if
Napoleon had never been born. Other men
would have arisen to make Napoleon's con-
quests and codify the law, redistribute the
worn-out boundaries of Europe and achieve
all those changes which we so readily
ascribe to Napoleon's will alone. There
are those who believe entirely in the indi-
vidual man and those who believe entirely
in the forces behind the individual man,
and for my own part I must confess my-
self a rather extreme case of the latter
kind. I must confess I believe that if
by some juggling with space and time
42

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Edward IV.,
W^illiam the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery,
and Robert Burns had all been changed at
birth it would not have produced any se-
rious dislocation of the course of destiny.
I believe that these great men of ours are
no more than images and symbols and in-
struments taken, as it were, haphazard by
the incessant and consistent forces behind
them; they are the pen-nibs Fate has used
for her writing, the diamonds upon the
drill that pierces through the rock. And
the more one inclines to this trust in forces
the more one will believe in the possibility
of a reasoned inductive view of the future
that will serve us in politics, in morals, in
social contrivances, and in a thousand spa-
cious ways. And even those who take the
most extreme and personal and melodra-
matic view of the ways of human destiny,
who see life as a tissue of fairy godmother
births and accidental meetings and prom-
ises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit
43

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

there comes a limit to these things — that
at last personality dies away and the
greater forces come to their own. The
great man, however great he be, cannot set
back the whole scheme of things; what he
does in right and reason will remain, and
what he does against the greater creative
forces will perish. We cannot foresee him ;
let us grant that. His personal difference,
the splendor of his effect, his dramatic ar-
rangement of events will be his own — in
other words, we cannot estimate for acci-
dents and accelerations and delays; but if
only we throw our web of generalization
wide enough, if only we spin our rope of
induction strong enough, the final result of
the great man, his ultimate surviving conse-
quences, will come within our net.

Such, then, is the sort of knowledge of
the future that I believe is attainable and
worth attaining. I believe that the delib-
erate direction of historical study and of
economic and social study toward the fu-
44

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

ture and an increasing reference, a delib-
erate and courageous reference, to the fu-
ture in moral and religious discussion,
would be enormously stimulating and
enormously profitable to our intellectual
life. I have done my best to suggest to you
that such an enterprise is now a serious and
practicable undertaking. But at the risk
of repetition I would call your attention
to the essential difference that must always
hold between our attainable knowledge of
the future and our existing knowledge of
the past. The portion of the past that is
brightest and most real to each of us is the
individual past — the personal memory.
The portion of the future that must re-
main darkest and least accessible is the in-
dividual future. Scientific prophecy will
not be fortune-telling, whatever else it
may be. Those excellent people who cast
horoscopes, those illegal fashionable palm-
reading ladies who abound so much to-
day, in whom nobody is so foolish as to
45

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

believe, and to whom everybody is foolish
enough to go, need fear no competition
from the scientific prophets. The knowl-
edge of the future we may hope to gain
will be general and not individual; it will
be no sort of knowledge that will either
hamper us in the exercise of our individ-
ual free will or relieve us of our personal
responsibility.

And now, how far is it possible at the
present time to speculate on the particular
outline the future will assume when it is
investigated in this way?

It is interesting, before we answer that
question, to take into account the specula-
tions of a certain sect and culture of peo-
ple who already, before the middle of last
century, had set their faces toward the fu-
ture as the justifying explanation of the
present. These were the positivists, whose
position is still most eloquently maintained
and displayed by Mr. Frederic Harrison,
46

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

in spite of the great expansion of the hu-
man outlook that has occurred since Comte.
If you read Mr. Harrison, and if you
are also, as I presume your presence here
indicates, saturated with that new wine of
more spacious knowledge that has been
given the world during the last fifty years,
you will have been greatly impressed by
the peculiar limitations of the positivist
conception of the future. So far as I can
gather, Comte was, for all practical pur-
poses, totally ignorant of that remoter past
outside the past that is known to us by his-
tory, or if he was not totally ignorant of
its existence, he was, and conscientiously
remained, ignorant of its relevancy to the
history of humanity. In the narrow and
limited past he recognized men had always
been like the men of to-day; in the future
he could not imagine that they would be
anything more than men like the men of
to-day. He perceived, as we all perceive,
that the old social order was breaking up,
47

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

and after a richly suggestive and incom-
plete analysis of the forces that were
breaking it up he set himself to plan a new
static social order to replace it. If you will
read Comte, or, what is much easier and
pleasanter, if you will read Mr. Frederic
Harrison, you will find this conception con-
stantly apparent — that there was once a
stable condition of society with humanity,
so to speak, sitting down in an orderly and
respectable manner; that humanity has been
stirred up and is on the move, and that
finally it will sit down again on a higher
plane, and for good and all, cultured and
happy, in the reorganized positivist state.
And since he could see nothing beyond man
in the future, there, in that millennial fash-
ion, Comte had to end. Since he could im-
agine nothing higher than man, he had to
assert that humanity, and particularly the
future of humanity, was the highest of all
conceivable things.
All that was perfectly comprehensible
48

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

in a thinker of the first half of the nine-
teenth century. But we of the early twen-
tieth, and particularly that growing major-
ity of us who have been born since the
Origin of Species was written, have no
excuse for any such limited vision. Our
imaginations have been trained upon a past
in which the past that Comte knew is
scarcely more than the concluding moment.
We perceive that man, and all the world
of men, is no more than the present phase
of a development so great and splendid
that beside this vision epics jingle like nur-
sery rhymes, and all the exploits of human-
ity shrivel to the proportion of castles in
the sand. We look back through countless
millions of years and see the will to
live struggling out of the intertidal slime,
struggling from shape to shape and from
power to power, crawling and then walk-
ing confidently upon the land, struggling
generation after generation to master the
air, creeping down into the darkness of the
49

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and
hunger and reshape itself anew; we watch
it draw nearer and more akin to us, ex-
panding, elaborating itself, pursuing its
relentless, inconceivable purpose, until at
last it reaches us and its being beats
through our brains and arteries, throbs and
thunders in our battleships, roars through
our cities, sings in our music, and flowers
in our art. And when, from that retro-
spect, we turn again toward the future,
surely any thought of finality, any millen-
nial settlement of cultured persons, has
vanished from our minds.

This fact that man is not final is the
great unmanageable, disturbing fact that
arises upon us in the scientific discovery
of the future, and to my mind, at any rate,
the question what is to come after man is
the most persistently fascinating and the
most insoluble question in the whole
world.

Of course we have no answer. Such
50

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

imaginations as we have refuse to rise to
the task.

But for the nearer future, while man is
still man, there are a few general state-
ments that seem to grow more certain. It
seems to be pretty generally believed to-
day that our dense populations are in the
opening phase of a process of diffusion and
aeration. It seems pretty inevitable also
that at least the mass of white population
in the world will be forced some way up
the scale of education and personal effi-
ciency in the next two or three decades.
It is not difficult to collect reasons for
supposing — and such reasons have been
collected — that in the near future, in a
couple of hundred years, as one rash op-
timist has written, or in a thousand or so,
humanity will be definitely and conscien-
tiously organizing itself as a great world
state — a great world state that will purge
from itself much that is mean, much that
is bestial, and much that makes for indi-
51

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

vidual dullness and dreariness, grayness
and wretchedness in the world of to-day;
and although we know that there is noth-
ing final in that world state, although we
see it only as something to be reached and
passed, although we are sure there will be
no such sitting down to restore and perfect
a culture as the positivists foretell, yet few
people can persuade themselves to see any-
thing beyond that except in the vaguest
and most general terms. That world state of
more vivid, beautiful, and eventful people
is, so to speak, on the brow of the hill, and
we cannot see over, though some of us can
imagine great uplands beyond and some-
thing, something that glitters elusively,
taking first one form and then another,
through the haze. We can see no detail,
we can see nothing definable, and it is sim-
ply, I know, the sanguine necessity of our
minds that makes us believe those uplands
of the future are still more gracious and
splendid than we can either hope or im-

52

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

agine. But of things that can be demon-
strated we have none.

Yet I suppose most of us entertain cer-
tain necessary persuasions, without which
a moral life in this world is neither a reas-
onable nor a possible thing. All this pa-
per is built finally upon certain negative
beliefs that are incapable of scientific es-
tablishment. Our lives and powers are
limited, our scope in space and time is
limited, and it is not unreasonable that for
fundamental beliefs wc must go outside the
sphere of reason and set our feet upon
faith. Implicit in all such speculations as
this is a very definite and quite arbitrary
belief, and that belief is that neither hu-
manity nor in truth any individual human
being is living its life in vain. And it is
entirely by an act of faith that we must
rule out of our forecasts certain possibili-
ties, certain things that one may consider
improbable and against the chances, but
53

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

that no one upon scientific grounds can call
impossible.

One must admit that it is impossible to
show why certain things should not utterly
destroy and end the entire human race and
story, why night should not presently come
down and make all our dreams and efforts
vain. It is conceivable, for example, that
some great unexpected mass of matter
should presently rush upon us out of space,
whirl sun and planets aside like dead
leaves before the breeze, and collide with
and utterly destroy every spark of life up-
on this earth. So far as positive human
knowledge goes, this is a conceivably pos-
sible thing. There is nothing in science to
show why such a thing should not be. It
is conceivable, too, that some pestilence
may presently appear, some new disease,
that will destroy, not lo or 15 or 20 per
cent, of the earth's inhabitants as pesti-
lences have done in the past, but 100 per
cent; and so end our race. No one, speak-
54

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

ing from scientific grounds alone, can say,
"That cannot be." And no one can dis-
pute that some great disease of the atmos-
phere, some trailing cometary poison, some
great emanation of vapor from the interior
of the earth, such as Mr. Shiel has made a
brilliant use of in his "Purple Cloud," is
consistent with every demonstrated fact in
the world. There may arise new animals
to prey upon us by land and sea, and there
may come some drug or a wrecking mad-
ness into the minds of men. And finally,
there is the reasonable certainty that this
sun of ours must radiate itself toward
extinction; that, at least, must happen; it
will grow cooler and cooler, and its planets
will rotate ever more sluggishly until some
day this earth of ours, tideless and slow
moving, will be dead and frozen, and all
that has lived upon it will be frozen out
and done with. There surely man must
end. That of all such nightmares is the
most insistently convincing.

55

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTTTRB

And yet one doesn't believe it.

At least I do not. And I do not believe
in these things because I have come to be-
lieve in certain other things — in the co-
herency and purpose in the world and in
the greatness of human destiny. Worlds
may freeze and suns may perish, but there
stirs something within us now that can
never die again.

Do not misunderstand me when I speak
of the greatness of human destiny.

If I may speak quite openly to you, I
will confess that, considered as a final pro-
duct, I do not think very much of myself
or (saving your presence) my fellow-crea-
tures. I do not think I could possibly join
in the worship of humanity with any
gravity or sincerity. Think of it! Think of
the positive facts. There are surely moods
for all of us when one can feel Swift's
amazement that such a being should deal in
pride. There are moods when one can join
in the laughter of Democritus; and they
56

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

would come oftener were not the spectacle
of human littleness so abundantly shot with
pain. But it is not only with pain that the
world is shot — it is shot with promise.
Small as our vanity and carnality make us,
there has been a day of still smaller things.
It is the long ascent of the past that gives
the lie to our despair. We know now that
all the blood and passion of our life were
represented in the Carboniferous time by
something — something, perhaps, cold-
blooded and with a clammy skin, that
lurked between air and water, and fled be-
fore the giant amphibia of those days.

For all the folly, blindness, and pain of
our lives, we have come some way from
that. And the distance we have travelled
gives us some earnest of the way we have
yet to go.

Why should things cease at man? Why

should not this rising curve rise yet more

steeply and swiftly? There are many

things to suggest that we are now in a phase

57

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

of rapid and unprecedented development.
The conditions under which men live are
changing with an ever-increasing rapidity,
and, so far as our knowledge goes, no sort
of creatures have ever lived under chang-
ing conditions without undergoing the pro-
foundest changes themselves. In the past
century there was more change in the condi-
tions of human life than there had been in
the previous thousand years. A hundred
years ago inventors and investigators were
rare scattered men, and now invention and
inquiry are the work of an unorganized
army. This century will see changes that
will dwarf those of the nineteenth century,
as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of
the eighteenth. One can see no sign any-
where that this rush of change will be over
presently, that the positivist dream of a so-
cial reconstruction and of a new static cul-
ture phase will ever be realized. Human
society never has been quite static, and it
will presently cease to attempt to be static.

58

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

Everything seems pointing to the belief
that we are entering upon a progress that
will go on, with an ever-widening and ever
more confident stride, forever. The re-
organization of society that is going on
now beneath the traditional appearance of
things is a kinetic reorganization. We are
getting into marching order. We have
struck our camp forever and we are out
upon the roads.

We are in the beginning of the greatest
change that humanity has ever undergone.
There is no shock, no epoch-making inci-
dent — but then there is no shock at a
cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say,
"Here it commences, now; last minute was
night and this is morning." But insensibly
we are in the day. If we care to look, we
can foresee growing knowledge, growing
order, and presently a deliberate improve-
ment of the blood and character of the
race. And what we can see and imagine
59

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

gives us a measure and gives us faith for
what surpasses the imagination.

It is possible to believe that all the past
is but the beginning of a beginning, and
that all that is and has been is but the twi-
light of the dawn. It is possible to believe
that all that the human mind has ever ac-
complished is but the dream before the
awakening. We cannot see, there is no
need for us to see, what this world will be
like when the day has fully come. We are
creatures of the twilight. But it is out of
our race and lineage that minds will
spring, that will reach back to us in our
littleness to know us better than we know
ourselves, and that will reach forward
fearlessly to comprehend this future that
defeats our eyes.

All this world is heavy with the promise
of greater things, and a day will come, one
day in the unending succession of days,
when beings, beings who are now latent in
our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall

60

THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE

stand upon this earth as one stands upon a
footstool, and shall laugh and reach out
their hands amid the stars.

6l

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EDWARD HOWARD GRIGGS. Editor

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